Dear Gretchen

In the book project Dear Gretchen, artist and designer Gretchen Nash found a wonderful way to explain part of her childhood. Here’s the concept in Nash’s words:

An extensive book that investigates letters that I have kept inside a luggage case since my childhood. The process of the book included finding the word and phrase frequency of the letters, categorizing them by sender, by date, and finally writing personal reflections about each of the senders. Graphs were constructed to reveal the word frequency and each of the 187 letters were thoroughly documented inside of the book.

Most of the charts are sculptural, which creates a wonderful contrast of warm craftiness and hard data.